Washington, Dec 23 (IANS) Beware of texting while driving as it is riskier than attending calls when behind the wheel, says a new study.
It found that texters in a driving simulator had more crashes, responded more slowly to brake lights on cars just ahead of them, than those who used a cellphone for making calls under the same conditions.

Researchers Frank Drews and his colleagues at the University of Utah (U-U) found evidence that attention patterns differ for drivers who text and those who use a

cellphone.

They say: “Drivers apparently attempt to divide attention between a phone conversation and driving, adjusting the processing priority of the two activities depending on task demands.”

But texting requires drivers to switch their attention from one task to the other. When such attention-switching occurs as drivers compose, read, or receive a text, their overall reaction times are substantially slower than when they are engaged in a phone conversation.

The type of texting activity also appears to make a difference, according to the study. Reading messages affected braking time more than composing texts.

A growing number of US states and cities, as well as Canadian provinces, banned texting while operating a vehicle.

Drews noted that more than a thousand billion text messages were exchanged during 2008 in US alone, said a U-U release.

They based their study on 20 men and as many women, aged between 19 and 23 years, engaged in a single task (straight driving) and a dual task (driving and texting) in a high-fidelity simulator.

The participants, experienced texters with an average of 4.75 years of driving experience, received and sent messages while the researchers observed their brake onset time, following distance, lane maintenance, and collisions.

The findings were reported in Human Factors.